The wonder of video compression : If you take two successive frames of any video, you’ll see that most of the time, there is really not much of a difference between each successive frame, maybe a few pixels change color, while others move around a bit. Well, for starters, try downloading this video, and its equivalent GIF.Īs youll see for the GIF, the resolution is much lesser, the colors are much less vibrant, and to top it off, the video is just 2.4MB, while the GIF weighs in at a whopping 14MB. So its quite easy to oversee how horribly inefficient they are. Today, we see GIFs almost everywhere : in blogs, funny content sites and twitter posts. Advertisements Animation #Īnimation is undoubtedly the reason GIFs are so popular today, and the reason I refer to them as : The Plague # The JPEG standard also has support for 16.9 million colors, albeit without transparency, since JPEG is meant to be used for photography, and not graphic design. Here, the blur near the edges, and the background, show different degrees of transparency (try pasting the image on some other background, the edges will blur into it), which is not possible with a GIF. In this PNG image, we can see that the edges of the dice are not sharp (they are gradually tapered off). The PNG image format on the other hand has support for 16.9 million colors (24 bit color channel) with an additional 8 bit channel for transparency (which means each pixel can have 256 degrees of transparency). This is because the GIF image standard only has support for 256 colors (an 8 bit channel) along with a binary channel for transparency (this means theres no translucency, either a pixel is completely transparent, or it’s not). You might have noticed that many GIFs depicting photographs and complex colored images seem a little jarred. This lossy format is highly optimized for photographs which have varying degrees of detail throughout the picture. This means that The quality of the image is compromised in some localized areas, but in return lead to massive gains in compression. We also have the popular JPEG image format, which is lossy. The PNG format is now the most used lossless format on the web. The GIF was known for its lossless compression, but has ever since been surpassed by the PNG format, a non patented improvement over the GIF.

Let’s see how the many features that made GIFs attractive, compare with their modern day counter parts : Advertisements Image compression # Your browser does not support the video tag. Turns out, this compression technique, coupled with animation, and the addition of transparency made GIFs particularly useful for displaying logos and simple animated icons with ~10 frames of images, like the ones you see on the official Space Jam website.ĭon’t get me wrong, GIFs were pretty amazing at the time for the use case they were designed for. Later, basic animation was added to the specs, which allowed for multiple images to be painted one after the other with a certain time delay. GIFs used a form of image compression (called LZW compression) which allowed for even large images to be downloaded in a short time, with slow bandwidth. Ironically, even though I am calling GIFs inefficient today, the reason they got so popular back in the day (1987) is because they were efficient. I could go on and on about how we should get rid of GIFs, but lets take a moment to find out why I feel so strongly about this.Īlready know why GIFs suck and want to know about a solution? Go here The origin and intent of the GIF # Hopefully by the end of this post I’ll have convinced you to fight the plague that is the GIF image format. For an image format so popular, GIFs are horribly outdated and inefficient, and they should die. GIFs have been around for as long as I can remember, and today they’re as popular as ever.

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